sness and death, as another vulgarizer put
it.

Next comes the expedition to South America and _The Argonauts_ appears.
The Atlantic is bridged,--there open up rich veins of picturesqueness
and new grand vague ideas, all in full swing when the war breaks out.
Blasco Ibanez meets the challenge nobly, and very soon, with _The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse_, which captures the Allied world and
proves again the mot about prophets. So without honor in its own
country is the _Four Horsemen_ that the English translation rights
are sold for a paltry three thousand pesetas. But the great success in
England and America soon shows that we can appreciate the acumen of a
neutral who came in and rooted for our side; so early in the race too!
While the iron is still hot another four hundred pages of well-sugared
pro-Ally propaganda appears, _Mare Nostrum_, which mingles Ulysses
and scientific information about ocean currents, Amphitrite and
submarines, Circe and a vamping Theda Bara who was really a German Spy,
in one grand chant of praise before the Mumbo-Jumbo of nationalism.

_Los Enemigos de la Mujer_, the latest production, abandons Spain
entirely and plants itself in the midst of princes and countesses, all
elaborately pro-Ally, at Monte Carlo. Forgotten the proletarian tastes
of his youth, the local color he loved to lay on so thickly, the
Habanera atmosphere; only the grand vague ideas subsist in the
cosmopolite, and the fluency, that fatal Latin fluency.

And now the United States, the home of the blonde stenographer and the
typewriter and the press agent. What are we to expect from the
combination of Blasco Ibanez and Broadway?

At any rate the movies will profit.

Yet one can't help wishing that Blasco Ibanez had not learnt the
typewriter trick so early. Print so easily spins a web of the
commonplace over the fine outlines of life. And Blasco Ibanez need not
have been an inverted Midas. His is a superbly Mediterranean type, with
something of Arretino, something of Garibaldi, something of Tartarin of
Tarascon. Blustering, sensual, enthusiastic, living at bottom in a real
world--which can hardly be said of Anglo-Saxon vulgarizers--even if it
is a real world obscured by grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibanez's mere
energy would have produced interesting things if it had not found such
easy and immediate vent in the typewriter. Bottle up a man like that
for a lifetime without means of expression and he'll produce memoirs
equa